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Dover Home Setting For Horror Flick

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By GEORGE WILKENS | The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 6, 2008

DOVER A century-old house that caught the creative eye of young filmmakers has been selected as the setting of an independent horror short, "Buzzards' Roost."
"We really lucked out, it's an amazing location," writer/director Brandon Windish said of the Fritzke Road property.
Windish "kind of panicked" after "losing" the house originally selected, in the Pasco County town of San Antonio. Following a doctor's recommendation to avoid excitement, the 89-year-old woman who lived in that house backed out of the deal.
"After three or four days" scouring several counties for an alternate location, "we had kinda given up," Windish said of the multi-county drive he took with Jon Wolding, his partner in Ground Up Films,.
Then, while scouting eastern Hillsborough County they spied through a thicket of trees the seven-gabled tower topping the two-story red-brick home at 2907 Fritzke Road, north of Interstate 4.
"One afternoon I was sitting here after work," when the pair called, said homeowner Lynn Robart, longtime mathematics teacher at Plant City High. Admiring the roofline, they said, "We think we'd like to use your house for our movie."
Understandably skeptical, Robart said, "Give me 24 hours, I want to find out if it's for real."
It was, and she and husband Larry, a steel fitter at a Tampa shipyard, "thought it would be a neat thing to do," she said as she watched the initial day of filming on May 29.
"You couldn't meet a nicer bunch of people" she said of the cast and crew of 20 which, for a week, took over the ground floor of the 4,000-square-foot former bed and breakfast, the barn and surrounding 3 1/2 acres bought in 1998 by the Robarts, who recently listed it for sale.
"I can't believe how lucky we are to have such amazing homeowners," Windish told the crew, assembled in front of the fireplace beneath one of two huge chandeliers in the front room of the farmhouse built in 1910.
Reluctant to reveal much of his plot, Windish said the antagonists are ghosts of trick-or-treaters slain three decades earlier by the occupant of the house dubbed Buzzards' Roost because vultures flock there at Halloween.
"Every year they come because they can smell the decaying flesh of the trick-or-treaters," said Windish, a 2001 Blake High School of the Arts graduate who recently worked in Los Angeles with companies producing a handful of TV programs and feature films.
In front of the house on a recent day of filming, a boom was ready to boost a camera operator 30 feet to film the finale, a rooftop scene near the distinctive tower above the main entrance.
Caged in the nearby barn were four vultures from Wildside Encounters in Belleview. With the assistance of vulture wrangler Don Shaw and his wife, Kathey, the birds were to peck at a baited disembodied head, created onsite creation by an Orlando special effects team.
Movie magic and a green screen will multiply the birds' numbers for another scene, making it appear dozens of buzzards are circling.
"We want to make a movie everybody is going to be interested in going to see," Windish said, similar to the horror genre he said he so enjoyed as a child growing up in Tampa. "I think it's time for us to have something we can escape to."

Hopefully, he said, the production with a budget "upwards of about 80 grand [$80,000]" will attract more than interest. "We're looking to get investors for a feature-length" script, Windish said. "With this 40-minute film we can prove to people we can make a scary movie."
The cast is a mix of theater-trained and film-trained actors, including former Tampa playwright and director Jim Rayfield, a former Blake High theater teacher, Windish said. "He's the lead and he's amazing."
With filming complete, editing will follow, with a Tampa premiere yet to be scheduled, Windish said. "Then we'll throw it on the [film] festival circuit. Then we're going to put together a package and go cold-calling for investors."

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